izigame.me

I'm a little mixed on DREDGE.
I beat the game in three sittings and had an incredible amount of fun with the first two. The core mechanics have great promise and exploring felt extremely rewarding. Unfortunately, it was the third sitting that really made it impossible to ignore the game's shortcomings.
DREDGE's issues are almost entirely economic, which is strange because the first few hours of the game feel so incredibly tight. Your storage, money, and time are all incredibly scarce and so doing anything that promises to unlock more of them feels extremely good. Catching fish means money. Dredging items means more ship upgrades. More money and resources means more engines and lights and speed and safety and cargo and all of that means even more fish. The gameplay loop feels incredible.
There is a hard point where this feeling goes away, however.
The game is split into five separate general areas, and by the time I was done with the third one my boat was all but completely upgraded. I had long since hit a point where I no longer needed money, which meant that I practically never fished anymore. For a while this was okay because there was more to explore, and exploring is my favorite thing to do in games.
In the early part of the game there was a lot to explore with two separate towns in the first area. The seas felt wide and dangerous with multiple characters and several sidequests to reward you and keep you busy. The second area similarly had a unique town with new characters, new fish, and a huge monster that the entire area was built around.
I was expecting the same of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th areas, but I was disappointed. Instead of new townships, the player is greeted with the same Traveling Merchant over and over. There are no more towns to speak of, nor are there any more sidequests. The main quest is structured almost identically across all of the remaining areas, and once your engine hits a middling speed nothing in the game will ever pose a threat to you again. I looked up the monsters that appear in this game and found that in 11 hours of play I'd somehow missed 80% of them. What's more, I can't fathom being stupid enough to ever encounter one, let alone to die in this game. There's simply no tension because your boat is built 60% of the way through the game.
Once your boat is built, there's nothing to work towards. Not only is there no fear of the unknown, the unknown is a little repetitive. The only "side quest" pursuit outside of the Marrows are three identical robed figures asking for specific fish. There are one or two unique things like adopting a lost dog, but the rewards for these quests are absolutely paltry.
That brings up another point: The game has several numerical issues regarding the value of various items and upgrades that anyone could've noticed in 10 minutes looking at the design spreadsheets.
A huge amount of rewards in the game are dredged treasure. Dredged treasure is unbelievably worthless after the first two hours, get the game keeps handing it to you. Only one shopkeeper in the world buys the treasure, and he buys it at a price that makes spending that limited cargo space on fish the better option 100% of the time. You only pull up one treasure per dredge, but you can get upwards of five fish of a similar price from a single fishing spot. I have no idea what the dev team was thinking with this.
There are upgrades you can get with dredged up materials (separate from treasures). This mechanic is excellent. It's only flaw is that meticulous players will be done with this halfway through the game.
Then there are upgrades that can be unlocked through "research parts", little items rarely rewarded through quests or found randomly. Almost every one of these needed to be reworked. The research skill trees frequently cost huge amounts to get worse upgrades that take up more valuable space in your boat. Huge, mediocre fishing rods take several unlocks to even reach, meanwhile the best engine in the game is on its own tree and be unlocked immediately. What's worse, you have no idea how good or bad an unlock is before going for it because they're all whited out.
Worst of all, research parts are highly RNG-based. You are supposed to farm them while dredging for items. But here's the thing: Once you've upgraded your boat and realized treasure is worthless because you have more money than you'll ever need... why would you dredge? Ever? It's literally crazy that side quests reward you with a single $50 ring (worth 1/4th of a good mid-game fish) instead of giving you more research parts.
I had such a good time with the first 7 hours of DREDGE. It would be unfair to call it "unfinished", but I'd also say that I think this game would really benefit from another 6 months or so of number-tweaking and enough time to add one or two more towns' worth of content into the game. Hell, the lagoon level already has a town modeled in. Just get some more character artwork and spend another four weeks programming and you're set, right?
Also I guess I'll mention that this game's story is extremely stock-standard for the genre. It's not bad, but if you've ever encountered a single Lovecraft-style "horrors in the deep" fishing town story before, there is absolutely nothing here that will surprise you. You're playing for the fish.